Viruses are typically viewed as serious health threats. But a team of researchers will try to change that view. They will be trying to use a certain type of virus that would actually help treat disease. This study would someday help provide a new way for doctors to treat diseases as well as how certain medications can be effectively delivered right where they are needed.

The discovery of a tiny plant virus and its certain actions may help Marianne Manchester, associate professor at The Scripps Research Institute, and her colleagues find a means to deliver drugs directly where they are supposed to go. The virus in question is the cowpea mosaic virus, a tiny plant virus that the researchers discovered can attach itself to a specific protein in mammalian cells.

Manchester and her colleagues have shown that the cowpea mosaic virus or CPMV interacts and attaches itself to a mammalian protein known as vimentin. Vimentin is part of a cell's cytoskeleton, the part that acts as an internal scaffold to give the cell its shape. While most of the time, vimentin largely resides inside a cell, there are times when a small fraction of the protein ends up on the cell's outer surface. This is where the CPMV attaches itself.

The way that CPMV attaches to the external vimentin of cells makes it ideal for researchers to further exploit. Not only that, researchers believe that the cowpea mosaic virus also can be made into an ideal delivery agent, making it possible for the virus to deliver "cargo" such as drugs to cells.

The structure of CPMV has been studied and expounded in 1999 by Scripps Research Professor John "Jack" Johnson. The said virus has about 300 different sites on its surface where researchers may be able to attach molecules. What makes the said virus an attractive candidate as a delivery agent is that it is only harmful to plants and quite small, making traveling easy throughout the body.

One of the examples shown by Manchester and her colleagues of the possible uses of CPMV in a published study in 2006 concerned the tagging the virus with several fluorescent dyes and the injecting it into mice and chick embryos. It led to the virus attaching itself in the endothelial cells that line up blood vessel walls. But to take advantage if the properties of the virus, the team needed to know how the virus interacts with cells and the proteins that they attach themselves into.

Now that the researchers know that the receptor for the said virus is vimentin, this will greatly help them direct the virus more accurately to a target with whatever "cargo" they want it to carry. A possible application that the researchers are looking into is by targeting the CPMV to receptors found in tumors to deliver treatments more directly.

Source: Scripps Research Institute. "Tiny Plant Virus May Be Useful As Drug Deliver Agent." ScienceDaily 6 May 2009. 6 May 2009